… makes his comeback both on and off the field

The lovely Mrs. Disco is not above toilet humor; after all, she married a guy perhaps best known to many for his toilet exploits.

However, for this story we will pick things up with Mrs. Disco exactly there, above a toilet … or more correctly, standing on a toilet.

The quick back-story:

Immediately after surgery, functionally, I was down an arm and a leg. Why a leg, you ask? In Tommy John surgeries, the graft for the new UCL typically comes from the Palmaris Longus which, for you latin fans, means it is located somewhere below your Palmus and runs Longus-ly into your forearm.

The reasons are many why this tendon is used for typical TJ surgeries, but perhaps the most important is the fact that it is essentially biomechanically irrelevant. As a result, something like 1 in 6 people don’t have it. Going into surgery, it was noted I was Palmaris Longus-deficient in my left wrist, but my right wrist showed promising signs. The story changed in surgery and it was determined my right PL would not suffice, so the doctors got a monster, hog-of-a-graft from my left hamstring.

Surgery went perfectly, but my Palmaris Wimpus resulted in my walking–er, waddling–out of the outpatient procedure with my right robot arm and my left leg able to (reluctantly) bear some weight, but with little to no ability to flex. My left knee was badly swollen and any activity of the hamstring sent a nice electric-cattle-prod-shock down my hamstring, across my knee, and down my shin.

After a few days, I was proficient in contact lens removal/application left-handed, amongst many other tasks. Most things were more daunting, but with the help of my amazing wife and some extra effort and patience, my daily life was mostly carrying on like normal-ish. Except that, typically, I shower daily.

My sense of smell was un-effected by the surgery and after some time I decided I was past due for a shower (reports vary on how many days had actually gone by). Maybe it was because she is insanely helpful and a godsend, or maybe it was because she didn’t want me to change my mind and go another day, Mrs. Disco immediately offered to help. With that, I asked her to meet me in the upstairs bathroom in fifteen minutes or at the base of the stairs when she heard a thump-roll-roll-bang-thud; whichever came first.

In the bathroom, we started up the tub for a bath, figuring keeping my leg and elbow wounds dry would be easier if the water was more or less at rest. As the tub filled, it was time for the undressing ritual. This is just the back story, so maybe I’ll leave this for another post, but undressing involved me holding my right arm (sans brace) with my left arm and balancing on my one free limb, my right let. Yeah, we won’t get into more details, lets just zoom forward to just before entering the bath, after applying water-proof bandages to my arm, wrist, and leg, Mrs. Disco passed a roll of Saran Wrap around my right arm to protect it from any errant water. The tub was surrounded by walls on three sides and the water spout was on the right when facing the tub from the bathroom. Left foot in, right foot in would be the ideal method of entry for this type of tub, but since my left foot could barely bear any weight, let alone all my weight while standing on a slippery tub floor, this was obviously not an option. (Side note, and you cannot make this stuff up, as I’m writing this, Mrs. Disco’s iTunes account just fired up some Right Said Fred I’m Too Sexy. Guess it’s time to just jump right in to how to enter a bathtub with a wrapped, braced, numb, swollen, and useless right arm and left leg. If you have the song, I’d recommend finding your iPod and playing it now to get the full visual, if not, just by me saying I’m too Sexy enough times, the song is probably playing in your head right now. I think the scene is set…)

So it was right foot in, spin around, slowly lower body so left arm can push bottles of shampoo and body wash off the ledge against the wall and brace my weight while Mrs. Disco carefully holds my right arm since I am sans-brace for the bathing. Once slowly lowered down, use the left arm to hold up the dangling right arm and keep it out of the water. Then, with no free hands, make sure the left leg stays elevated and ends up on the left edge of the tub and out of the water.

And I do my little turn on the catwalk Yeah on the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah I shake my little tush on the catwalk*

*I’m not at all kidding, this is actually happening. That’s what’s playing in the background right now as I type. I hope you’re in the moment as much as I am. To acquit Mrs. Disco from any scrutiny for her music selection (and indict me for much worse offenses), I downloaded the song a long time ago to turn it into a ring tone I could use as an alarm clock.

Let’s digress. You’re caught up; the stage is set for the Toilet Revenge. I’ve Patrick Swayze-d my way into the tub and have my leg awkwardly hovering up the wall. Not quite a model, if you know what I mean. I’m Too Sexy aside, when poor Mrs. Disco signed up for this baseball wifery, needless to say, I don’t think what she had in mind was the scene taking place.

So how do we end up with Mrs. Disco on the toilet? The tub method just wasn’t working. I think it was a combination of my incessant nervous laughter as Mrs. Disco tried to make some progress with a loofah and the fact I just couldn’t hold myself in a position with my arm and leg out of the water long enough without getting electrocuted by that missing tendon in the back of my leg. So we decided to go with a shower. The plan, as it was suggested to me, was we’d drain the water from the tub and Mrs. Disco would start the shower while aiming the shower head down to not get me wet. Once the shower was running, she’d help me up.

The plan was flawless, yet at this point I still had the nervous giggles and Mrs. Disco was now cracking herself up with comments (however inaccurate they might have been) about how it was probably cold to have a tub drain out from around you. My laughter made her laugh harder. Her laughing meant we were still sitting in the cold bathroom, which only perpetuated more laughter. We were an absolute giggling mess. A brief thought-collecting sigh only preceded more laughter, but gave Mrs. Disco enough wherewithal to mount the toilet and from her tip-toes, she could reach the shower head to begin to execute the plan. The shower head was one of those hand-held heads that “docks” onto a base high up in the shower so you can pull it down if you chose to, or leave it up like a normal shower. She carefully kept it balanced in its dock, but aimed it down so when the shower started to spray, it wouldn’t hit me. While holding on to the shower head and leaning against the wall, she then balanced on one tippy-toe and reached with her free foot to turn the water back on and then to shift the flow of the water from the spout to the shower head.

You know that brief moment of silence after you flip the switch in a shower to start the shower flow? The time where there’s no water flow coming out of either outlet? The time where you can quickly pull your head out of the shower and escape the shower’s downpour? The calm before the storm, of sorts? Yeah, at that moment, that exact moment, just as the water was gaining momentum vertically up to the shower head and about to unleash a spray of water across the entire shower that the lid to the toilet Mrs. Disco was standing on slipped a few inches away from the shower and she lost her balance. Her foot was still dangling into the shower to keep pressure on the switch, and her only course of action to try to regain her balance was to quickly grab the shower curtain rod. The plastic, spring-loaded, “tested to approx. 0.6 Newtons of force” curtain rod.

As I sat watching all this take place in the empty (potentially cold) tub, still with leg up in the air and left arm cradling my dangling right arm over the tub wall, waiting for my wife’s help to lift me up to a standing position, the shower curtain and rod came crashing down onto the tub millimeters before Mrs. Disco who crashed down milliseconds before the toilet seat broke and flew off the toilet and the flow of shower spray rained down.

Thankfully, Mrs. Disco suffered no injury in the fall and somehow she was athletic enough to fall clear of my limbs which were probably draped everywhere she would have ideally been able to land. There was a split second of silence to assess the damage level, which upon realizing was nil, gave way to an eruption of hysterical, wet laughter.

If you were to walk in to the bathroom at that moment, you would have found a toilet seat and lid on the ground by the door, a fully-clothed, soaking-wet wife in the push-up position heaving with laughter while straddling a bathtub covered with a shower curtain and rod twisted up diagonally against the wall. The hand-held shower head had been knocked off the dock by the shower curtain on the way down and now, powered by impressive water pressure, was swinging wildly across the shower like a live electrical wire. Rugs, towels, walls, toilet paper, mirrors were wet. After the dust had settled, we noticed standing water in the trash bin. Back in the tub, the naked, wet, perhaps cold, baseball player with one leg elevated up the shower’s side wall and a heavily-bandaged right arm covered in a disheveled mess of Saran Wrap held by his left arm dangling out the side of the tub would have only been noticeable by the belly laughing going on under the shower curtain. Thankfully for us, no one did walk in the bathroom at the moment.

But they came close. The story ends here with an ironic twist. Remember the amazing host family from Arkansas who we desperately did not want to saddle with a clogged toilet as we were getting moved to another city? Yeah, them. Well, since we’ve blogged, they happened to move to Cincinnati and were again hosting us while we were in Cincy having surgery and rehabbing. The mom, who was at the store while we started the shower-scapade, had come home and undoubtedly heard a loud crash from the shower and ran up the stairs. “Everything OK in there?”

It was all I could do through my laughter to hold back from eking out, “Yeah, we’re fine. But we finally broke your toilet.”

I would have guessed perhaps my mother and sister were the only two who kept up with this blog, but I’m humbled to find there are more than just two people who are waiting for updates and new blogs. There’s also my wife, so that makes three.

It’s a lot easier to blog when there’s constant excitement and I had planned to blog throughout my entire tommy john recovery, but I found that typing with one hand was much more difficult and tiring than I had anticipated. So, the kick in the pants I apparently need is some material to blog about. Quite a few people have wondered how rehab has gone, am I throwing? what’s in store for baseball? etc., so I’ll do my best, albeit briefly, to bring you up to speed.

Surgery was an amazing success and I am back to throwing and very soon will be ready to officially play ball again. I feel stronger than before, my body is healthier, mentally I feel I am ready, and I’ve had fun learning how to control the new movement I have on my pitches. Most of my rehab started out throwing overhand, but more recently I’ve worked back in the submarine delivery and more importantly a lot more sidearm, which I am pretty excited about.

Here are some elbow pics –

Pre-Surgery:

During Surgery:

Day After Surgery:

Early/Mid June 2011:

Day Stitches Came Out: (end of June, I think):

August 2011:

Today, May 8, 2011:

Until I have more than just working out, throwing, and rehab exercises to talk about I’m thinking about bringing back some older posts I’ve written – unless you can come up with some good things for me to blog about, look for some Batman, poopsticks, and shower shoes to make their appearances soon.

It has been well documented we can be influenced by our surroundings or by what we hear even when our conscious mind is “turned off” or totally out of it, such as when we are asleep or under anesthesia. As previewed here on this blog, Mrs. Disco and I are doing everything we can to have as positive an influence on my healing process as possible. This meant we had a huge opportunity while I was “under the knife. During surgery, a time when a patient is most vulnerable/susceptible to picking up on what doctors/nurses are saying, we felt it would be a great opportunity to apply a powerful technique Mrs. Disco is not only trained in, but also amazing at: Guided Imagery.

Guided imagery can be explained in many ways—many of which I’ve heard, but I’m still not confident enough to publish what it is. So I’m going to leave that to Mrs. Disco in the paragraph below.

We look at it as a therapeutic tool using carefully chosen language, suggestions, and visualizations to positively influence the mind and body. What this means is that while Chris was under anesthesia for his Tommy John surgery, instead of listening to the voices of the medical staff and the beeping of machines, he was going through images and feelings of miraculous healing, among other things.

I find all of this fascinating. Mrs. Disco teaches me more about this kind of stuff every day as we go along the healing journey. There are some particular aspects of all of this we find truly intriguing. First one is the mind, in an altered state (under anesthesia for example), is capable of more rapid and intense healing, growth, learning, and performance. The other is that medical literature suggests when we have a sense of being in control, that, in and of itself, can aid in healing and recovery.

One of the things I was worried about with the surgery was that I would be able to feel what was going on, but be able to do nothing about it. Not sure where I got this, but maybe I’d flipped through an after-school drama one day and seen this phenomenon. Thankfully this didn’t happen, but based on how amazingly good I felt immediately after coming out of anesthesia, my mind was still working and listening.

So, if we can hear while we’re undergoing surgery and we heal better if we feel like we’re in control, then I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear a doctor say, “I don’t think he’s going to make it” or “he’s bleeding all over the place” and I also want to feel like I’m in control in some way, shape, or form. Thankfully, I had an incredible surgeon, Dr. Kremchek, who is not only all about this, but we’ve noticed, he is also someone who focuses on the positive, naturally and effortlessly. So when Mrs. Disco came up with the idea for me to wear noise-canceling headphones to listen to an mp3 she made especially for my TJ surgery, Dr. Kremchek was all about it.

So how is someone supposed to feel like they are in control when they are actually completely out of it? Good question. I wondered the same thing.

I will add this aside…For some reason during the 2006 baseball season (before even meeting Mrs. Disco), I decided every time I wanted to sleep on a bus, I would play a mix of Radiohead songs. I had a bunch of their songs, but never actually listened to any of them, so I decided to listen to them while I was asleep. To this day, I have not purposefully listened to a Radiohead song while awake, but when one does come on the radio, I instantaneously know that I know the song and have heard it. Interesting…huh? I couldn’t tell you one lyric of any Radiohead song, but I have heard them—consciously or not—for hours and hours (long bus rides in the Midwest League) and they are implanted somewhere deep in my brain.

This brings us to my surgery. Mrs. Disco’s research told us we are susceptible to suggestion while unconscious, her experience made her the perfect candidate to record an audio track with Guided Imagery, and I had experienced first hand already the effects of listening to something while unconscious. It was all coming together perfectly. So for my surgery, I wore noise-canceling headphones while listening to guided suggestions asking my body to move blood away from the surgical area for a clean working space for my surgeon, asking my body to regulate my blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing by keeping it stable and by telling my body it’s okay to accept the new ligament as if it belonged there all along.

I’m so grateful God gave Mrs. Disco this amazing and totally pertinent ability to motivate me and help me heal through language and imagery. The mp3 is about an hour and twenty minutes long and its expansive content encompasses a bunch of stuff I don’t know much about, just know it works. She included the three sensory modalities (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). We all have preferences of how we like information presented to us and usually tend to respond better when they are presented in our “choice modality”. For instance, some people are visual learners who like to see what you mean in a diagram or picture. Auditory learners tend to “get it” when they simply hear an idea, while kinesthetic learners need to experience what you are talking about for themselves. Like learning to ride a bike – some may only need to see someone else riding the bike to know how to do it on their own. Others may only need instructions given and are able to get on the bike and start riding. While others need to actually get on the bike and try it themselves before they can fully learn. Most people learn through a combination of sensory modalities, so Mrs. Disco included all three on my mp3.

Here are a couple very basic examples of the three modalities she used on my mp3 (Mrs. Disco asked me to tell you these are the most simplistic forms of applying these techniques)

Auditory: “When you hear the beeping of machines, your body relaxes even more as you tune into your Inner Healer for a miraculous recovery.”

Kinesthetic: “Every time air enters your lungs, you’ll be reminded to relax and experience pleasant sensations of healing”

The day of surgery, I asked the nurse to give me at least a ten-minute heads up before getting wheeled into the O.R. so I could start my mp3 to help me relax a little more. All I remember is hearing my wife’s sweet, soothing voice calming my thoughts, reassuring me I was safe and in good hands. Next thing I knew, I was in the recovery room elated with my amazingly strong, new elbow and telling anyone who walked by how awesome it was.

Today if you were to ask me what was on that CD, I would have no idea. But the surgery went perfectly and from day one I have been healing amazingly well and have been ahead of schedule. And every once in a while Mrs. Disco says something that makes me think…hmm, I know I’ve heard that before.

Bout darn time we get back on the ball, eh? So, we’ll pick up where we left off… answering the question:

How are we going to work together to get this elbow to heal miraculously and what do we need to do to make it happen?

We both truly believe the path to absolute optimum health and recovery consists of:

I) You

Positive thoughts

A true belief in your healing

Realistic understanding of the process

Ability to really listen to what your body is telling you

Surrounding yourself with a healing/healthy environment

II) Add-Ons

Guided Imagery

NLP & Hypnosis

Meditation

Prayer

Healing Touch

Tapping

All of us have the ability to decide how we are going to feel about something – we can either complain about how something isn’t perfect or we can cheerfully, with gratitude see all the good things about that same situation. We can think of our aches and pains as “bad” or be grateful we are able to recognize the signals our body is trying to tell us and then figure out a plan to manage or even fix the source of the problem.

In this same manner, language and how we use our words holds more impact in our lives than we might imagine. If someone constantly identifies themselves as having a “bad back or bum knees or ‘what a pain the neck’ or ‘this is a pain in my butt’” – well, this may come as a surprise to you, but more than likely your back and knees aren’t going to get any better and if you hadn’t had neck or butt pain, more than likely you’ll eventually talk yourself into having neck issues and hemorrhoids…. unless you shift into using more positive language patterns like you may have already begun to start thinking about, now.

Same goes for this miraculously healing elbow. The mind and body are more powerful than we can imagine. The body has the ability to heal itself, but we end up talking ourselves out of it. We started thinking, well, what if we instead talk ourselves INTO it… what if we can be a catalyst for encouraging a positive healing experience?

Mahatma Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” This also goes for our immediate surroundings and relationships with others. If we want to live in a more positive, healthy environment or have better relationships, then we have to look inside ourselves to begin that change. You can’t expect other people to change for you. But if we gradually shift our own attitude, we then begin to see the world around us shift as well. So that’s what we did with the elbow. We truly believe the blowout was a gift from God. We’ve dug deep; taken an honest look at ourselves to figure out our fears, our faults, our short-comings and as hard as it is to do, it’s what gives us the ability to make progress; to be the change we wish to see in our lives.

So, as we share these next few blogs, as much as it seems we are writing them to share with others, (which we are), we are more so writing them for ourselves to help us grow. We pray for you and hope at the very least one-person smiles while reading this and thinks to themselves, “yes, I also want to be the change I wish to see in the world and in my own relationships and surroundings” and in turn, a small piece of your world is just a tiny bit better because of this. It’s the least we can hope for.

I’m bequeathing the blog reins to the Mrs. again for a while. Don’t worry there’s some good parts…er, I mean some parts I wrote (found in italics)…sprinkled in there as well.

Lately we’ve gotten in the blogging mood while I’m at PT and typing while doing elbow flexion and extension exercises ad nauseam has proven messy. I’ll be back on board soon enough…until then, here’s the better half:

So why the heck are we so excited about all of this? During that first week of ups and downs, yeses and nos, we had the opportunity to sit back and reflect on what all of this means for us and our future in baseball.

The first radiologist’s phone call was actually the toughest. That night we had company over, so Chris took the phone call up in our bedroom. He was taking longer than I expected so I excused myself to check on him and instead of finding him talking on the phone about rehab options, I found him lying on our bed face down in a pillow – silently crying. He was crying hard enough that I could see his back shaking with the sobs. While I doubt he’d really want me to tell everyone that he was bawling, the way I look at it is in that moment who wouldn’t cry if someone just gave you news that appeared as if your boyhood dreams were officially over? I’ve seen Chris tear up here and there and even cry once or twice in our 4 years of marriage, but I’ve never seen him like this. I climbed on his back and kissed the back of his neck while he sobbed. As he choked back tears, he took his head out of the pillow and said, “It’s over. It’s torn. Baseball is over.”

For me the craziest thing was that instead of breaking down into a hot mess of tears, I instead was filled with a very calm and peaceful clarity. For the first time in my life I actually had nothing to say, but I knew I had to do something. So I said, “Get up. We’re not crying over this. Get in the car. Let’s go watch the sunset.”

Ever feel like you’re in a dream-world and crazy-talk just starts spilling out of your mouth? Don’t try to tell me this has never happened to you. While we were watching the sunset from our daze of a dream-world, staring blankly into the distance, a thought popped in our heads, “This isn’t what you think. Baseball isn’t over. Rather, it’s just the beginning.”

We tried to put the reality of the situation in perspective – it just seemed a little too far-fetched to actually believe this crazy thought, but then suddenly new questions quickly started coming up, one after the other, as quickly as we could say them out loud. Little by little it all started to make sense.

What if my elbow actually started deteriorating years ago without even realizing it? This idea forced me to think back over the past few years and with surprise started recognizing more and more pieces of the puzzle starting to connect themselves.

Was the cause of my drop in velocity over the years not related to the addition of new arm slots like we had thought, but rather a deteriorating UCL instead??

I’m going to add a disclaimer here on behalf of orthopedic surgeons across America. The Tommy John procedure in itself doesn’t make you throw harder. Some have this misconception and want to bring their 11-year-old in to get Tommy John so he throws harder. In my isolated case, I believe that in the past, my body was protecting itself from further injury to the UCL and in turn wouldn’t allow me to “let go” and throw hard. If I have had 106mph in me all along, my body was only allowing me 75% throttle so to speak, because it knew that kind of force on the kinetic chain would cause further injury. I started off in college throwing mid 80s from my low arm slot and every year for the next six years steadily dropped one or two mph each season. It could make sense my body needed to provide more and more shelter and continue to throttle down. Don’t get me wrong, I love Disco, but by this past season I was throwing 74-76mph.

Is that why I struggled with controlling my slider over the past couple seasons, even though it was my original go-to pitch?

It’s not a secret breaking balls put a lot of stress on the elbow. But over the past 3 or 4 years as my slider has up and left me, I never had a reason to question if health were the cause. I have been wracking my brain for years now on this exact issue. I’ve likened it to dogs and cats. My slider used to be like a well-trained dog, it was always by my side and did what I told it to do with precision and obedience. One day (probably in 2008) I woke up and my slider was an unruly cat. Many days I couldn’t even find it, and when I did, it had a mind of its own going seemingly wherever it pleased with emotions ranging from apathy to boredom. It made no sense, and worst of all, it made me a one-pitch pitcher. As I said, when health wasn’t a concern, the mystery was –well, a mystery. If it turns out my body’s been protecting itself from injury and holding back through the cat-ification of my slider, it’s a mystery no more.

Disco just shout across the room, “hey you should say, ‘bullet point number seven: Is that why he sucked the last two years in AAA?’” 🙂

Is that why he always felt like he should be able to throw harder, but could never convince his body to actually break through that barrier?

What we find most cool about this one is that we both truly believe God gives us opportunities when we’re ready for them and not a second sooner. In the exact moment we become ready for something, its like the ‘that was easy button’ BAM – here’s your new opportunity. This is exactly how we feel about the torn UCL. Chris’s body must have subconsciously known it couldn’t handle a 105 mph fastball with a sub-par ligament, so it prevented him from throwing anything harder than 86 (overhand).

Maybe that blockage was fueled by a fear of not being ready or good enough for the big leagues; maybe the body knew it wasn’t ready, so it caused that fear. The instant Chris recognized this hidden fear might be holding him back, with the help of his teammates, he dug deep to release that barrier.

It was in that very INSTANT when we feel he actually became mentally ready for the big leagues, in turn producing the fastest pitch of his life. This is the EXACT INSTANT that God smiled and BAM, hits the ‘that was easy button’, saying, “let’s blow this pop stand (er, elbow) and give you a new, stronger, and better elbow that can handle the speed you are truly capable of”.

Where can we sign up?

After all of those plausible thoughts came streaming through, one last crazy-talk idea came up:

Now what if we revolutionized recovery time for tommy john surgery by getting Chris’s elbow to miraculously be 100% in only six months after surgery instead of 10-12 months? Imagine that?! We could totally do it. We have all the tools we need. He could be ready for winter ball, throwing 120, big league spring training invite, breaks out of camp less than a year after TJ as opening day starter for the Cubbies. (We’d even be okay if it weren’t the Cubs…. It would just be so convenient for us. We live a mile from the stadium, we have family there, all of our friends, Tracy’s business… list goes on).

Obviously we acknowledge this last part is just pure crazy talk, but it’s what fueled us that first week through the seesaw of medical opinions and is most importantly what led us to this uber-ly influential question; the crux of our motivation:

How are we going to work together to get this elbow to heal miraculously and what do we need to do to make it happen?

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